Calhoun's

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The red double doors are big enough to ride a horse through, and in my mind I hear the clop of hooves on this pitted concrete floor. I don’t know if this anomaly in the heart of the Broadway shopping zone is a leftover from the times, maybe eighty years ago, when this would have been on the urban edge, the land still cultivated before the developers bought it up, or if it’s planted kitsch, a gimmick to draw the hangers-out that hang out here. The walls are black painted rough sawn timbers, with whitewashed mortar between. The windows are huge, pine-framed, matched by mirrors down the side walls, from the floor to the fourteen foot ceiling of exposed two-by ten joists, cross braces, nails showing. Quaker chairs and wooden spindle-legged tables, stressed but gleaming, line the walls and fill the barn-like room. Behind the shiny food bar filled with pastas and salads and decadent desserts, hang the obligatory pastel-on-chalkboard menus, rainbow hued, lettered art. Someone reads an old cloth bound book, someone studies organic chemistry, a man with skin pale-to-blue stares at a laptop screen, taps the keys, pauses. Ernest discussion over beer or coffee. Leonard Cohen on the speakers, and then an Irish flute.


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